Ride the Wicked Woodsman (A Night Falls Alpha Werebear Shapeshifter Romance) (14 page)

I passed the time answering Clover's questions, my thoughts drifting occasionally as I searched the room for Taron's location. It was never in the same place. He moved from newcomer to newcomer and talked with each one at depth.

Not once did he come over to talk to me.

I'd fallen hard for someone who was more or less a replica of my father -- pack before family. It was weird, then, that Taron cynically expected everyone to put family before pack in deciding how to act.

"I suppose it's better for you that you haven't conceived," Clover said, catching the direction of my gaze.

I shrugged. It was hard to imagine my situation worse. But the lack of a cub in my womb probably made things easier on Taron and some stupid part of me was glad for that even if the reality of the situation was that he meant far more to me than I did to him.

"Fuck," Clover whispered under her breath, her hand discreetly gesturing off to the right of the alcove where five males had just emerged from the tunnels. "I was hoping that asshole had tucked tail and run. He's got no one keeping him here."

The asshole in question was Mallory. With him were Axel and what I guessed were the three little shits who had chased me through the woods.

One of the younger males glanced in my direction, the instant flushing of his cheeks confirming my suspicion.

"Well, that's one voting block that's not in our favor," Clover quipped.

I looked at her, a smile playing at my lips despite the sinking feeling in my stomach. My expression sobering, she looked away.

"Look," I said, leaning closer to her. "I want you to forget about me. Like I told Taron, I'll make it out of Night Falls alive. You have to think about how you and Braeden are going to escape."

She shook her head but didn't voice her disagreement.

"Looks like everyone is here," she said a few minutes later as a small band that appeared to be made up of two families came in. "Which probably means all hell is going to break loose until Taron can get them to shut up."

With the volume of noise already high enough to make the walls of the chamber vibrate, I didn't think shutting them up would be possible any time soon. Throughout my conversation with Clover, telling her about the different factions in Champaign and about city shifters in general, I had overheard snippets of the discord that permeated the room.

Only a few shifters had vocalized support of letting me stay with the pack instead of turning me over to my father if that was what I wanted. Mallory had suggested seeing how much time could be bought by parceling me over to my father limb-by-limb.

That kind of conversation was picking up now that we had a full house.

Taron gave everyone who wanted it a turn at saying their peace. A lot of fingers pointed at me, so many I felt Clover start to shrink.

"You don't have to sit over here," I whispered to her as a shoving match broke out between Mojo and Axel.

"I'll get up when it's my turn to talk -- once all these blowhards have exhausted themselves and people are ready to listen to a little reason."

I gave her a grateful shoulder bump. In the center of the room, Braeden had broken up Axel and Mojo and the latter was speaking about how the pack needed to stick together. He was also in favor of offering me protection. When the boos and howls broke out at the suggestion, he deflected it with reason. I knew the vulnerabilities of each side, he offered. Then he asked if they wanted an alpha of my strength sitting on the sidelines or fighting for Night Falls?

Heads swiveled in my direction again, a whisper surfing the crowd.

Will she fight for us?

If they had actually dared to ask me, I would have told them -- I was willing to fight and die for my friends.

The real question was, who beyond the young she-wolf sitting next to me was my friend?

"My turn, I think," Clover quietly said as she stood up.

Despite Church being held for the whole pack, Clover was the first woman to speak and another murmur of discontent went up as she stopped in the center of the room. Braeden came and stood beside her, his hand resting against her back.

She looked up at him and smiled.

"You've all been talking about turning Onyx -- which is her name for all of you assholes who've been avoiding using it," she started, her cheeks burning red. "Turning her over is just stupid. Giving them what they want only buys the promise of a little time. And that's all it is -- a promise. They gave it after first saying no harm would come to anyone if we turned her over, but Onyx exposed their lie."

The whispers in the room began to lose their harsh edge.

"You've wasted a lot of fucking time and suggested a lot of horrific things!" She really had her fire up and I could see the guilty looking down at the ground instead of glaring at me or staring at their spunky little accuser.

"Are you willing to die for your friend, she-wolf?"

I didn't need to look for the speaker -- I'd been choking on Mallory's voice all night.

"Fucking right, I am," Clover shot back before sweeping her arm at a now silent audience. "But I'm pretty sure we'd all rather live and do it without looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives, however short a time that might be."

Every head bobbed in agreement except for Mallory's -- and Taron's.

His gaze was locked on me, his expression as unreadable as always.

"Look," she said, jabbing her finger in the direction of those who had called the loudest for turning me over, whether it was in one piece or many. "We're all afraid of these assholes from Illinois, but there's something that we're afraid of even more -- and those fuckers out there, threatening us right now, they're just as afraid of it as we are!"

Every set of ears in the room was trained on Clover at that second, waiting for her to reveal the ultimate monster. She looked at them, prodded them to find the answer with a shake of her head. At last she turned to Taron.

"Humans," he said. "The Illinois packs don't want a clustered massacre. Too high profile. They'd rather pick us off in small groups, might even already have the roads around Night Falls watched by kill crews...but..."

He stopped, the trail of bread crumbs she had laid out for all of us ultimately leading him just a few steps beyond where she had left off.

I stood up but didn't move beyond the alcove. Still, my voice carried loud across the room.

"We threaten the other packs and prides with exposure to the human world."

Clover nodded, a grin stretching her mouth almost up to her ears. "More than that, we threaten to expose the truth we've all discovered here to the members of their packs. Let shifters across the country, even across the world know all the lies they've been fed about cross-breeding. They'll have to fight a mutiny from within."

"We should do that last part anyway," Mojo broke in. "But how could we really expose anything if we had to?"

Clover rolled her eyes at the elk's question then threw her hands up in dismay as no one seemed to understand.

"Guys, there's a reason it's called the world wide web."

********************

Clover's idea got everyone to stop arguing and start working on her plan, but it didn't stop the stink eyes being thrown my way or the occasional whisper that reached my ears before the pack finally disbursed to carry out the feisty beta's orders.

"We're walking a fine line," Taron said, deigning at last to speak to me now that most of his pack was winding their way through the caverns and couldn't see him consorting with the enemy.

"I think her idea's brilliant," I replied. "Especially the body cams broadcasting over a private server with the threat of it going live. The small amount of video we post to the public will be taken as a viral movie campaign with great special effects. But any real shifters who see it will recognize it as real."

I only wished Clover didn't want me to be her star actress in showing the transition to a shifter's alpha state. I was pretty sure she had some secondary motive in picking me, maybe to avoid exposing anyone in the pack or maybe to make my own pack more eager to leave me behind in Night Falls.

"It's fucking genius, really," I said before realizing the plan's creator was making a beeline for us.

Her face lit up and she gave Taron's arm a gentle punch as she stepped into the alcove. "You, pooh bear, should demote Mallory from Secretary of the Woodsmen and install me."

I had a feeling her cocky but deserved request would smash the rules of both cultures if granted. Women had power within the packs and prides, but never leadership roles. It was like those dreadful questions human male politicians asked about whether the nation could withstand having a president with PMS in charge of nuclear weapons. And from the little I'd seen of motorcycle clubs in the real world, women were only back-of-the-bike bitches, not even members, let alone officers.

Different species, same fact -- men are mostly assholes.

"You're right," Taron agreed, surprising us both.

"And buy me a really bitching bike," she added, quick to capitalize on his response.

"That I absolutely will do if your idea works," he smiled, a little more of the tension he had carried with him since Braeden's arrival outside the cabin melting away. "But it's up to you to convince your overprotective big brother that you can ride."

"Seriously?" she asked, mouth agape. "You'll buy me a bike? You realize I'm talking about a motorcycle, right? And not some scale model."

"Right," he nodded. "Bike's yours if your plan works."

"Then let's get our asses moving! We've got a movie trailer to make and Braeden's got to hit the truck stop and the electronics store. And I've got a fucking script to write and only a few hours to do it!"

"Yo, Bro!" she yelled, leading us toward the tunnel that would take us back to the clubhouse. "Get your ass over here, we're leaving. Chop chop!"

We paused at the tunnel, waiting for Braeden to catch up and lead the way while Taron guarded the rear. Clover kept up a constant stream of chatter until we reached the underground waterfalls with the chem lights still lit.

Directly in front of me, Clover stopped to appreciate the surreal beauty. "Damn, I love it when it's lit up like this."

I had to pull up quickly to avoid running into her, my feet suddenly skittering over the slick, rocky ground like I was trying to walk on marbles. I was going down, nothing to hold onto to stop my fall.

Taron wrapped his arms around me, strained for a second to keep both of us from ending up on our backs, then pulled me up straight.

I brushed at his hands, tried to get them off me as heat raced through my body. It didn't matter that he had only reacted on instinct in stopping my fall, I wanted him, my body needed him, and that need flared at contact.

At least it did for me.

Even if he was too tactful to tell me he was no longer interested in a relationship and had instead come to view me as a danger to his pack, his actions over the last twenty-four hours, especially since the morning, provided all the objective evidence I needed.

"Go on ahead," Taron ordered the wolf siblings. "We'll catch up in a few seconds when we've got our feet under us."

I expected at least a slight objection from Clover, but her eyes lit up and she grinned. She threw me a sly wink then saluted Taron.

"Lay on, MacDuff," she said, taking hold of Braeden's arm and ushering him away from us.

"You're really going to be insufferable if we survive, aren't you?" he asked, his voice loaded with affection.

"Yeah," she shot back. "People will start thinking we're twins."

Watching them go, a light film of tears coated my eyes. I had never had anything like their relationship with Eric, but for a few years with Selisma, she had been practically attached to my hip.

I wiped at my eyes before turning to Taron. His reason for sending them on ahead was obviously bullshit. He had something to say that he didn't want them to hear.

"I didn't get a chance to ask what you thought of the match your father plans."

The question came out so emotionless a computer could have been reading it for him. It didn't deserve an answer. He didn't deserve an answer.

"It may provide an opportunity for you to change the pack from the inside out," he went on in the same deadpan voice. "Not that it helps today, but it's something you should think about."

"I already have," I answered, stepping away from him to follow after Clover's disappearing light.

Truthfully, I hadn't contemplated life as Jonah's mate. Taron hadn't met my brother, hadn't tasted the palpable hate rolling off him whenever he was around me. Eric would do everything he could to make sure the pair bonding with Jonah never happened. Hell, he had no love for Selisma, either, and had likely made plans to ensure there would be no uniting of the two packs, leaving him to play alpha once our father died even though he wasn't born with the strain.

My stupid brother thought that all the drugs he pumped into his body -- the steroids and the amped up marijuana, the PCP -- could make up for that fact that he couldn't hold the alpha state -- that point when a shifter was more powerful than man or beast and the body was a twisting conglomeration of both creatures.

Or maybe he thought something in the drugs would finally help him maintain the state, to mimic at least one of the special gifts that came with the alpha strain.

"And?" Taron prompted, catching up to me and snagging my elbow so I had to stop.

"And it's none of your business what my future away from Night Falls is," I bit out, angry at the way my body kept responding to his touch and how quickly things had changed between us.

All that time in the alcove with all that hate swimming around me, all the threats. He'd stayed away, left it to others to disagree that I should be dismembered.

"Let go," I growled. "And try to use your fucking head. The part I'm going to play in Clover's plan? You really think Marcus is going to want me paired with his son after that?"

I didn't wait for him to answer. I twisted my arm out of his hard grip and rushed through the tunnel as quickly as I could to catch up with Clover and Braeden without landing on my ass or sounding like I was fleeing the man who'd just spent the last six days gloriously fucking my brains out.